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Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Consciousness on Psychedelic "Medicines"

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

The way [psilocybin is] being used [by research scientists] is in a very controlled
or guided setting.

Set and Setting

"...They [scientists] don't just give you a pill and send you
home; you're in a room. You're with two guides, one male, one female.
You're lying down on a comfortable couch.

What do you want, monsters?

"You're wearing headphones
listening to a really carefully curated playlist of music -- instrumental
compositions for the most part -- and you're wearing eye shades, all of
which is to encourage a very inward journey.

"Someone is kind of
looking out for you, and they prepare you very carefully in advance.
They give you a set of "flight instructions," as they call them, which
is what to do if you get really scared or you're beginning to have a bad
trip.

What are you here to teach me, monster?

"If you see a monster, for example, don't try to run away.

"Walk
right up to it, plant your feet and say, 'What do you have to teach me?
What are you doing in my mind?'

"And if you do that, according to the
flight instructions, your fear will morph into something much more
positive very quickly."

On how psychedelics can help change the stories we tell about ourselves

"The
drugs medicines foster new perspectives on old problems. One of the things our
mind does is tell stories about ourselves.

"If you're depressed, you're
being told a story perhaps that you're worthless, that no one could
possibly love you, you're not worthy of love, that life will not get
better.

"And these stories -- which are enforced by our egos really -- trap
us in these ruminative loops that are very hard to get out of. They're
very destructive patterns of thought.

"What the drugs plant-medicines appear to do is disable for a period of time the
part of the brain where the self talks to itself.

"It's called the default mode network,
and it's a group of structures that connect parts of the cortex -- the
evolutionarily most recent part of the brain -- to deeper levels where
emotion and memory reside.

"And it's a very important hub in the brain
and lots of important things happen there: self-reflection and
rumination, time travel.

"It's where we go to think about the future or
the past, and theory of mind, the ability to imagine the mental states
of other beings and, I think, most importantly, the autobiographical
self.

It's a whole new way to look at cyclic time.

"It's the part of the brain, it appears, where we incorporate
things that happen to us, new information, with a sense of who we are,
who we were and who we want to be. And that's where these stories get
generated. And these stories can be really destructive, they trap us.

"...This network is downregulated [with psychedelics], it sort
of goes offline for a period of time. And that's why you experience this
dissolution of self or ego, which can be a terrifying or liberating
thing, depending on your mindset.

"This is what allows people, I think,
to have those new perspectives on themselves, to realize that they
needn't be trapped in those stories and they might actually be able to
write some new stories about themselves.

"That's what's liberating, I
think, about the experience when it works.

"But here we have
something [in entheogens] that occasions an experience in people -- a mystical experience [which Alan Watts describes as coming from the root word mu or mum, shush, that which can't be spoken] that somehow makes it easier to let go.

"And I think some of it has to
do with the fact that you do experience the 'extinction' of yourself
and it's kind of a rehearsal for [pleasant] death.

"And I think that may be part of
what helps people, that they [these entheogenic substances] expand their sense of what is your
self-interest. And your self-interest is something larger than what is
contained by your skin. And when you have that recognition, I think
dying becomes a little easier....

"There's no way to prove this, obviously, and it's a question that
really troubled me as an old-fashioned materialist skeptical journalist.

"It's like, 'What if these drugs are inducing an illusion in people?' I
got a variety of answers to that question from the researchers. One was, 'Who cares if it helps them?' And I can see the point of that.

"The
other was, 'Hey, this is beyond my pay grade; none of us know what
happens after we die.' And others say, 'Well, this is an open frontier.'...

"The experiences that people have are very real to them --
they're psychological facts. And one of the really interesting qualities
of psychedelic experience is that the insights you have on them have a
durability...

"This isn't just an opinion; this is revealed truth, so
the confidence people have is hard to shake, actually.

"And they would say things
like, 'Well, I had this amazing experience. I died three times. I
sprouted wings. I flew through European histories. I beheld all these
wonders [past life memories?].

"I saw my body on a funeral pyre on the Ganges. And I realized,
the universe is so amazing and there's so much to do in it that killing
myself seemed really stupid.'

"And that was the insight. Yes, killing
yourself is really stupid -- but it had an authority it had never had.
And that, I think, is the gift of these psychedelics.

On his own experience tripping on magic mushrooms

"I had an experience that was by turns frightening and ecstatic
and weird. ...I found myself in this place where I could no longer
control my perceptions at all.

"And I felt my sense of self scatter to
the wind -- almost as if a pile of Post-Its had been released to the
wind -- but I
was fine with it. I didn't feel any desire to pile the papers back
together into my customary self...."

Howard Bloom started '60s?

"Then I looked out and saw
myself spread over the landscape like a coat of paint or butter. I was
outside myself, beside myself, literally, and the consciousness that
beheld this...was not my normal consciousness, it was completely
unperturbed. It was dispassionate. It was content, as I watched myself
dissolve over the landscape.

"What I brought back from that
experience was that I'm not identical to my ego, that there is another
ground on which to plant our feet, and that our ego is kind of this
character that is chattering neurotically in our minds.

"And it's good
for lots of things. I mean, the ego got the book written, but it also
can be very harsh, and it's liberating to have some distance on it. And
that was a great gift, I think."

-Michael Pollan

Sam Briger and Seth Kelley
produced and edited this interview for NPR broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly
Seavy-Nesper, and Scott Hensley adapted it for the Web.

Funny

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